Is music quality moving away from the "audiophile"

Recording quality has been in a very steady decline for a very long time now. But speaking as a performing classical musician, most of us absolutely detest compression and over-amplification and fake digital reverb and all the other favorite tricks of so-called "sound engineers." I would place the blame on them and the record producers that employ them - very often the musicians themselves have absolutely nothing to do with such choices. Perhaps very famous pop artists sometimes get some control over it, but this is quite rare. Most musicians have absolutely no control over what they will sound like on a recording, or even live if the performance is miked in any way, as it often is even in a wonderful concert hall where it is absolutely not needed, simply because that is what everyone is used to and expects nowadays. On the other hand, you wouldn't want to hear most pop singers until they have gone through the mixing board first....even many audiophiles have absolutely no clue what their favorite artists really sound like unamplified and without their mixing boards.

Sorry for that rant, but I just had to put up with some really atrocious live sound tonight in a pops concert. To get back to the original posters topic, yes it is especially true that these things happen in hard rock recordings, and that they are indeed happening more and more as more people listen exclusively on iPods. Technology and sales figures have always come before musical considerations for the vast majority of engineers, and if iPods and computer downloads are selling even more music, then I fully expect the situation to get worse yet before it gets better again. This negative assessment has much to do with the fact that most young people interested in sound engineering nowadays have no clue about how things used to be done - they simply don't know any better. Any idiot with a computer and a mike can make a recording now and put it on the web, and many do. OK, I'm scaring myself. Time to stop this - I just wish alot more people cared about quality sound.

Yes. Sound engineers are quite adept at "gumming up" the sound with "compression and over-amplification and fake digital reverb and all the other favorite tricks".
Still, while compression certainly does degrade the sonic quality of what is put down on vinyl, and of the music we listen to live in the analog world in which we actually live, compression of digital files can be compensated for during the decoding of them. The technology/software just has not fully arrived there, yet. The current software isn't "smart" enough.
On another note, many young people, today, DO care about sound quality. Teens, like my daughter, are seeking out turntables and vinyl pressings more and more because "they just sound better". While record companies' CD sales are declining, their LP sales are increasing. Just look at the increase in bands coming out with their latest recordings on the LP format.
I went into a Compusa a couple years back inquiring about the best way to get the music off my LPs on to my hard drive. The young man behind the counter said, "Why would you want to do that when records sound so much better?"
And, the other day, my daughter said to me, "Dad, I am getting your Bob Dylan collection when you're dead, right?"

Here come the posts confusing data "compression" as a means to shrink a file size with audio "compression" which makes the audio louder yet less dynamic.

Here's a link to an excellent site, and organization "Turn It Up" that talks about what many recording artist and record producers are trying to do to improve the dynamics on recordings and get away from the wholesale "compression" of recordings.

http://www.turnmeup.org/

Are you surprised that the total gestalt of the culture is turning to crap?